Apple Drops $500B on AI while Google Gemini Eyes Your iOS Devices! | E2089

0:00I've been reading a whole bunch about this company Outlier. outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kind of services like a human editor to aid in training your ai model and here's the great news if you are a worker at google or you're a worker at facebook or you're a worker for our government you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office they're going to send you back to the office when you get back to your office don't tell elon don't tell elon this is why overworked or overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places.

0:37I know it because - Oh, I've got a window open right now. I've been doing this the whole show. Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double dipping, here we go. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.

1:08And Vappy. Add real-time AI-powered voice conversations to your apps for business in minutes, not months. Go to vappy.ai and use code TWIST200 to get$200 in credits. That's over 1 ,000 minutes in free calls. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me, producer Lon is here. Hey, everybody. And Alex is on a little vacay. He'll be back, I think, on Monday. Is that right, Lon? I believe that is correct. Yeah, we've got this week to ourselves, and then Alex returns next week. Big show on Wednesday. Big show energy coming when we have Vlad from Robinhood and Raul from Superhuman, two of my earliest stage investments that have had incredible success.

1:47So I'm going to talk to both of them about how they're doing with their businesses and startup lessons, all kinds of great stuff. So this Wednesday is big Wednesday energy. make sure you tune in live youtube.com do a search for this week in startups hit the subscribe button click on all notifications follow me at x.com slash jason or follow jason calaganes on linkedin those are the three places we stream live monday wednesday friday at 12 texas time 10 a.m pacific time 1 p.m eastern time but those two interviews they might run on friday or next monday so just keep that in mind if you tune in live you get a real good preview of what's coming down the pipe.

2:25We've got a pipeline of great stuff and we're expanding the social footprint. Where can people find us again? We're on at TWI startups on X. We're at this week in startups on LinkedIn. Go to Instagram this week in startups, all one word. We've also got the subreddit going. I'm back in there moderating r slash TWI startups and TikTok is next on my itinerary. We're going to get over there and start posting there because, you know, I'm 46 years old. I got to be on TikTok, right? That's where all the middle-aged divorced guy energy people are going. Yeah. I mean, it's so addicting. Everybody's there.

3:02I want to start doing some videos just for TikTok in the coming weeks, something I've been wanting to do. And I think I got to do reaction videos because I noticed there are so many great videos, even historical ones, of people who've been on the program or me interacting with famous people. It might be fun to go through some of the things i said and i like these videos where people do reaction videos or they talk play the video talk yeah you got your head in the corner commenting on what people are watching that's that's classic tiktok yeah so i want to learn that genre as it were um speaking of genres uh today would have been steve jobs 70th birthday i believe yeah pretty sure it's 70 because i saw that tim cook did a nice little tribute on x you are right 1955 he was born february 24th 1955 well 20 years ago uh when i was doing in gadget and the company weblogs inc autoblog joystick we were real pioneers in podcasting and blogging back then i wound up selling that company to aol 18 months after i started it was a big part of my success in those early years and i would go to a conference that uh walt mossberg and karen swisher would host called all things digital all things d and uh this is from 2005 when i had started uh first started doing podcasting i did a calacanis cast which eventually became this program this week in startups and we did a podcast for autoblog which were two of the first five to ten podcasts ever shout out to dave weiner who created rss and the podcasting technology along with the pod father adam curry two legends who don't get enough credit uh but let's play the clip here and lon you can give your thoughts after here we go uh steve there's a thousand bloggers at microsoft and uh bloggers at the people at apple i understand are not allowed to blog and you don't blog i'm saying employees why is that well i i don't blog for the same reason that I read Bill describing why he doesn't blog.

5:10It's a pretty time-consuming thing. And once you start, you kind of feel like it's one more thing you've got to do every week. 50-year-old Bill Gates. But in terms of blogging at Apple, again, we have a lot of secret stuff going on. And it's one of those things where we'd really rather not have to have some of our employees spreading that around and not have to get upset with people who you know made a bad judgment about what to put in their blog and what not to put in their blog okay so pause there for context here i was running the blog company at microsoft and a guy named robert scoble had uh infiltrated he was working at microsoft he created he took the blog platforms that were already out there and he just said everybody at microsoft start writing about what you're doing and he would run around microsoft with a camera and make short videos and talk to them i don't know what's going on with my haircut there but i'm obviously a way a little bit more than i do now that's like a really interesting it's not even a mullet what is that it's like half everything the same length it's almost like you've got you're doing like a little pompadour thing you've got like this little flip in the front but it's it's instead of going up a little it's down i don't know what that's called i don't know what this is called i think it's called like super cuts maybe i was on a budget you gotta remember i was kind of broke back then i met you about two years after this and this was not your look anymore you had a totally different look by no i mean this is like preppy uh brooklyn jcal yeah and i don't know what's going on with the collar of that shirt is a little bit off but anyway putting aside my aesthetics you've had a glow up since a little mini glow up since then for sure but the blogging thing was an interesting question because blogging had become this radical medium we take it for granted now that anybody would publish but back in that day everything you said as a technology company was interpreted through the media right sure yeah if you were releasing a new product and this is why this wall street journal d conference and ruper murdoch owned this conference i think he paid uh karen swisher and walt mossberg 500 000 to a million dollars a year to host it which was very controversial at the time but it made you know 10 million bucks the tickets were i don't know at that time probably three thousand four thousand dollars i couldn't afford it but i got a journalist pass well you're rubbing elbows with bill gates i mean it was pretty pretty cool all of those people um who were doing stuff at that time were being interpreted by the wall street journal so if bill gates came out with a new product there was no youtube at the time i think youtube had just launched but it wasn't like it is today twitter wasn't launched the iphone was launched uh right in 2005 was the iphone launched no not yet no iphone yet right wow so that really dates this 2007 that was 2007 2007 right so shortly he did that and podcasting had just come out and this event was a seminal moment because adam curry was there and he had negotiated with steve jobs to in itunes and itunes is where you bought music to allow you to go to itunes and add an rss feed like you take the url of somebody's podcast and put it in there and then it would put on your ipod which was a music player from back then an album that said podcast and you could subscribe to podcast and it would show up on your ipod it would download it when you synced your ipod because ipods didn't have an internet connection and back then we were using i guess like whatever the precursor to 3g was like very low data you couldn't download over data audio or video at that time on a mobile phone and the mobile phone you would have been using would have been in a nokia so no bueno on an mp3 but you would download them and the next day you would listen to these podcasts and i had a couple of them as i said so i was going to ask him next i had a two-part question one was why don't you blog the second question i was going to ask him is would he allow us to sell our podcast for a dollar and create a revenue stream because i was desperately trying to figure out how to make money off these things and let's play the second part of the clip will you be able to add any rss feed to the or any podcasts, RSS feed to iTunes or is it only through the store?

9:08Oh, you'll be able to add anything you want completely open. We're just working with the open standards out there. And will you help companies like ours sell podcasts, be an audible? So if we wanted to sell a podcast through your service, would you help us do the fulfillment? We're planning on having all the podcasts be free at first, but zing me an email with what you've got in mind and we're open to anything. Same email I always send it to you? Yep.

9:37so it's always nice to get a big laugh from a crowd like that that's a good feeling i mean people think like uh me making jokes and being witty is like a new thing i've been doing this my whole life but the funny part about that was i knew i was telling a joke in the moment but i did have steve's email and we would trade emails sure uh because of engadget he read engadget and he would tell me if we got something wrong and uh he's just such a giant i miss him so much I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but I met him a dozen times. I was in like press junkets with him, you know, one-on-one a couple of times.

10:11I had conversations with him. Squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy. It doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service. Maybe you're just sharing your ideas. Maybe you're an artist. Maybe you're a consultant. Squarespace is going to give you all the tools to make this happen. And as you know, Squarespace is always adding cutting edge features. This is why I've been using it for over a decade. And Squarespace is actually the longest running partner here on This Week in Startups because every time I need a new feature, Squarespace adds it. And the new AI tools are unbelievable.

10:47They have one called Design Intelligence. It's like having a world-class designer sitting next to you in your office and you just answer a couple of questions and their AI builds you a fully customized site that's perfect for your brand. That's unique to you. and it does it in just minutes. Personalized layouts, on-brand visuals, premium content, it's all ready to go. So start your year off strong at squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10 % off your first website or domain purchase. Squarespace.com slash twist.

11:18Thank you to Squarespace for making such a great product that we use year after year at an affordable price. And we really appreciate your partnership. I was one of those people when Steve Jobs died where I was a little skeptical on the globe-shifting genius stuff. It's like, you know, I mean, I always think of these things as, these companies are teams. These are collaborative. Anytime anybody's like, this one guy is the genius, I'm always a little cynical on that. Like, well, they were in charge of this huge group of innovative people and they all came together to make the iPhone. But if you look at Apple post-Steve Jobs, it's clear that something has fundamentally changed.

11:56I think going back, hindsight being what it is, he was obviously bringing a level of whatever, creativity or ambition, whatever it was, that Apple is not the same without him as with him. So I think that his legacy has been cemented over the last few years of Apple coming out with various technologies that are not as globe-shifting as the iPhone. Exactly correct. Steve Jobs put Tim Cook in charge, and it was a controversial move because Tim Cook isn't like a creative force visionary. And I think he would admit that, you know, obviously not comparable to Steve Jobs. Nobody is. But he was the supply chain guy.

12:37So what did we see since Steve's passing? How many years has it been since Steve passed? My gosh, it's got to be 10 years now. He died in 2011. So, yeah, close to 15 years. Unbelievable. And it's just such a presence that's missing. he was at that time kind of like elon in terms of his presence everywhere and you know the attention he got bill gates always kind of like second fiddle to him because steve's aesthetics his products were so much better at the time than microsoft's microsoft had more products microsoft had more revenue at the time he was always that archetypal like coder developer nerd like he was the guy behind the scenes writing the code.

13:21But Steve Jobs was that like the creative, artistic visionary where he wasn't just building products that worked right. He was thinking about the future and like, what's everybody going to be doing in 10, 15, 20 years? And so I think it is a different kind of idea. I wonder now that the Steve Jobs roadmap, one of the last things he was working on was like TV and solving the TV problem, which Apple TV was set to do, which was to just let you do a search with Siri for anything on your Apple TV and not worry about where it lived and just give you that kind of thing. But he missed the AI wave. I wonder what Steve Jobs would be doing right now during this period of time with AI.

14:05And I can tell you, it would not have been like Memoji AI or handing it off to OpenAI. I mean, he would have been in the thick of this. I think that's the, you know, Steve Jobs, his vision, it was always the walled garden. We're going to create our own bespoke version of this technology that just works intuitively and you don't have to worry about all the, you know, setting it up or the complexities. It's going to be a perfectly smooth experience. So I think very different from how we're seeing AI develop now where things are leaning towards open source and it's all these different tools and products that you can sort of mix and match on your own i think apple would have had a much more like here's apple ai here's the suite of products and it's all our it's all in-house in our system it doesn't interact with everybody else's whatnot all right speaking of apple big news today um and this goes to the make america uh independent again i would say innovative again whatever you're resilient again manufacturing mama make america manufacturers again mama so that'll be one of our trends here apple has announced plans to spend 500 billion dollars hire 20 000 people in the u.s over the next four years to build ai servers company said it was his largest spend commitment ever ever on anything ever it's a 250 000 square foot factory they're putting in north of Houston in Texas, that's going to be a Foxconn plant for assembling advanced servers.

15:41Now, of course, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company, famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, for assembling iPhones overseas in particularly Chinese factories. The working conditions in Foxconn factories in China, a longstanding issue for Apple. Foxconn already has AI servers operating in Mexico. So we're going to move some over here. It's part of an elaborate plan to avoid potential Trump tariffs rather than bringing in all of these servers from elsewhere. They're going to make them right here in the US so they don't have to pay the 20 % plus premiums. Foxconn also planning data centers in Arizona, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, elsewhere maybe.

16:22And it is important to bear in mind, just for clarity, the servers are going to be assembled in the US. some of the parts like the chips and other advanced components they're still going to import from elsewhere to then assemble the servers within the u.s this is a tough thing here because uh 500 billion dollars in servers uh in a data center is a curious thing to happen here because they don't have their own language model so i am confused what is the point of these 500 billion and this giant data center they are going to put what servers or gpus in here are these going to be nvidia servers um are these going to be you know some new service it's it's very unclear and then what would this giant you know data center actually do is it going to be competitive with colossus by grok and elon musk is it going to be competitive with sam altman's open ai and what they're building or you know i have my own theory apple has not been in the data center race and doesn't have a cloud computing offering like aws or azure for microsoft or google cloud or oracle's cloud right so you get these four giant clouds if you're an entrepreneur you're a startup you can go um you know instead of standing up your own service you just rent them right and and people can move between them really well it's awesome and apple doesn't have one what if apple did have one and then if you were an app developer it was somehow deeply integrated into the app store and if you were a media company you somehow could leverage it as well this could be very interesting it would be a totally new revenue source now they would be the last person to the party right obviously, but they do have this advantage and they have a huge developer community making apps.

18:18Right. So if they made it, you know, free for apps or$100 a month for apps that are, you know, have X number of users, I think they could get a lot of that business and then they could do deep integrations into the phone. It would be trusted. So maybe that's what they're planning here. The New York Times does say these servers are going to contain chips made by the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company uh or you know tsmc one of the world's biggest suppliers of these so they're going to be the chips are going to be made in taiwan uh and by the dutch company asml interesting stuff because you know tsmc actually makes nvidia's right nvidia correct does the architecture of them the actual assembly is being done there so i wonder if this means apple is going to be making their own ai chips i don't know if they already do that but you know it's kind of interesting what we're seeing here with president trump he wants to do on-shoring um that's a big focus and and he's very you know interested in maybe becoming independent of tsmc and china and having our own supply chain this doesn't solve that problem if tsmc is making them but tsmc is making fabs here in the united states so this feels to me like the decoupling from china which is a huge priority yes who is the biggest manufacturer biggest american company involved with china it's apple right and this does tie directly in biden last year before leaving office awarded tsmc 6.6 billion in grants to build more chips here uh some of those chips are already being assembled in a plant in arizona so you're absolutely correct this is part of decoupling all of this as best we can from China and bringing that manufacturing over here.

20:09Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SOC 2 or ISO 27001 are the keys to building trust and unlocking these opportunities, but they take time and energy pulling you away from building and shipping a beautiful, great product. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're your partner. Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution, helping startups like yours and mine get audit ready and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly.

20:49How do they do it? Well, Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down, helping you streamline your audit. And the platform connects you with trusted vcsos to build your program auditors to get you through your audits quickly and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing so here's your call to action whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth vanta makes compliance easy join over 8 000 companies including many y combinator tech stars and launch startups who trust vanta simplify compliance and get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com slash twist that's v-a-n-t-a.com slash t-w-i-s-t i wonder geopolitically if this means i hate to get big picture here but zooming out i think this means that china is going to invade taiwan and we're not going to defend taiwan and we're in a race to get taiwan uh semiconductor on short here in the event that happens now hopefully it doesn't happen but i think you know everything i hear from people on the inside is that we are um yeah in big picture geopolitical terms trump's very anti the idea of america being the global cop the everybody's protector having all of our fingers in all of these different pies and that was an increasingly big topic during the biden years was you know china's ramping up militarily in the south china sea there definitely are increasing hints that you know xi wants taiwan back and just like uh putin wanted crimea and ukraine back xi wants taiwan back uh and so yeah i mean i think u.s foreign policy for the last several decades has been we're taiwan's ally if china invades taiwan we're going to back Taiwan.

22:39And, you know, the semiconductor industry being in Taiwan was only an added inducement. We have to defend Taiwan at all costs. I think President Trump sees things very differently than that. He doesn't want to be on the hook to fight China in the event that Xi goes after Taiwan. So, right. So, big picture. It's almost like he's trying to force. I feel like Trump is trying to force a multipolar world where we're independent, isolated. If China wants to, you know, have some adventures in that area and take over Taiwan. So be it. If Russia wants to, you know, do things on their border, that's up to the EU to defend it.

23:16But the United States is going to focus on the North American continent. Yeah. I mean, you could hear it explicitly when J.D. Vance is attacking, you know, globalism. This is what he's, this is exactly what he's talking about. This idea that all of the allied countries of the world are a united front against all the evildoers of the world. And that's just how America has viewed the world since really, since the end of World War II, the Cold War. It's fascinating too, because it's a very democratic position to not be the world cop, you know? Well, if you went back to when I was like in high school in the nineties, of course, it was very progressive liberal.

23:50Like, why are we intervening in all of these other countries' business? That's their business. And it's just economic colonialism and we should get out of, you know, all of these other countries. And now, because it's president trump doing it in a lot of ways it's you sort of flip and democrats hate the idea i've been reading a whole bunch about this company outlier and it is a training data company now what is training data as you know all these ai models are slurping up data off the open web they used an open web crawler this open web project they did it without getting permission that's why the new york times is in a lawsuit and countless other people's you put that against the backdrop of well how do we get more information into these systems there was a really interesting product that captured everybody's imagination 20 years ago called mechanical turk there was some sarasaurus which was doing tagging of like images and data entry there's business process outsourcing in the philippines and india that's always occurred where westlaw and lexus nexus would take legal documents when they were faxed, you know, back in the day, and they were print, and they would literally type them in and do data entry.

25:02Well, now we're entering a new phase, which is finding subject matter experts, and then having them do queries, look at the results, and fix the results. And I think they're actually going and putting primary data into these based on each vertical. Why is this important? Getting sued could cost you hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars you could get an injunction against you and so there is an opportunity here for startups to take subject matter experts humans have them go find information on the web and have them type it now they could be stealing the information as well but because they are a little bridge with this outsource company it doesn't matter because open ai let's say or you know some other language model anthropic could hire this company and i don't know the details, but they could hire a third party and these third party data providers exist everywhere.

25:55Who knows how they're getting the information? They could be scraping, they could be writing it in, they could get subject matter experts, so all different ways to do it. And then they buy that from them. That company indemnifies the company. They just bought the data from them. If there was ever a problem, it's at arm's length. The same thing was done to seed social networks. People hired third parties to put content onto social networks. Another way of saying paying people to go rip videos from other sources, put it on there. There was a very interesting angle to this story about journalists.

26:25So basically, Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kind of services, like a human editor to aid in training your AI model. And a lot of those jobs are going to former journalists, people who are at risk or have already lost their job to AI are now helping to improve and fine tune the AI systems that are putting them out of work. Journalism jobs in 2024, 2025, increasingly hard to come by. The news industry cut around 5 ,000 jobs just last year. That's a 49 % spike from 2023, the year before. And these outlier type AI training jobs, they're fully remote. They're consistent whenever you want to work.

27:09You can do them full-time, You can do them part-time. They pay$35 an hour or more. You can see why as a freelance writer, this is a perfect fill-in supplemental gig for me. If I only have 25 hours of writing work to do this week, another 15, 20 helping to edit AI systems, well, now I'm full-time employed. So far, I totally appreciate what you're saying that you could use these to actually build the training data for your models. So far, what Outlier is doing mostly is having them sort of fine tune the results. So they're fact checking, they're looking for hallucinations, and if there are hallucinations, they're reporting them and correcting them.

27:50And they're even noting when they get responses from chatbots that pull from inaccurate or less than ideal sources. So if it sees, oh, the chatbot's relying too much on blogs or personal writings or op-eds or social media posts that aren't verified, we should refocus it to more verifiable, reliable sources. So one thing I thought was interesting, if you think about it, it's basically the work a human editor used to do for a human writer. Check your sources, make sure your facts are right. If something doesn't sound, fix your grammar if something doesn't sound right. So that job has really not changed.

28:27You're just helping a chatbot get better at writing instead of a green reporter who's just starting out. Outlier is owned by SF's Scale AI. The company is valued at$13.8 billion. Their customers so far include OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. So these journalists are feeding the biggest, you know, they're working for chat GPT, basically. This is a good use of funds. If your company is worth a couple of hundred billion and you're raising 10 billion, I mean,$35 an hour, you know, if you were to do a million hours of work would be 35 million. If you did a 10 million hours of work would only be 350 million, 10 million hours of work.

29:11I think you could recreate the corpus of everything in the world. That's a lot of time, yeah. So this process is called reinforcement learning with human feedback, R-L-H-S. Yes, and it's outlier.ai. We should definitely get the CEO on the program. Sure. But it's interesting that they're going after journalists, and this is the point. New work is always created. Here it is. New work is being created. Yeah. And I bet you that this work pays better. 35 an hour is good, man. That's from home? I've definitely had writing jobs that did not pay 35 an hour, like not even that long ago. If it was work from home as well, it's a$70 ,000 a year job.

29:48You just times it by 2 ,000. That's an incredible job for work from home. Yeah, think about it. You just log in when you're ready to work. They've always got plenty to do. So you just log in. Here's your day's assignment. Okay, I did my eight hours. I'm done. And here's the great news. If you are a worker at Google or you're a worker at Facebook or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office they're going to send you back to the office when you get back to your office don't tell elon but no this is the this is why overwork or overemployed is such a phenomenon i guarantee you people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places i know it's open right now i've been doing this the whole show oh fantastic great well double dipping here we go we'll be in an office soon in a studio so i'll be over your shoulder and I'll know if you're doing it.

30:39Then you'll be noticing. 2025 is going to be the year that voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything. And this technology is perfect for building a chatbot or automating customer calls and basically creating these next gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take your developers months to build and test anything even basic unless you use VAPI. V-A-P-I. This is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build, test, and deploy voice agents in just minutes.

31:19And you can create ultra-realistic AI voices and customizable personalities. I like that part. All with real-time response speeds. You know what'd be great? Maybe I just demo it. Okay? Listen to this. Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast. Oh, okay, great. Are you interested in being the co-host of the podcast? I mean, I'd love to. Just imagine the banter, AI and humans, the ultimate duo. But I think I'll stick to helping out with Bobby for now. All right. What's up in the startup world today? You know, we have so many things going on in the startup world, including AI. So I'm wondering if you have any tips for founders on how to create great AI experiences.

31:58Totally. I mean, first off, keep it simple. Focus on solving real problems for users. then make sure it feels natural. Good conversation dynamics are key. Oh, and don't forget to optimize for speed. Nobody likes waiting for a response. What do you think? That sounds really good to me. Take care and chat soon. Gotta say, these are ready for primetime. And if you want to give it a try, you can see it works. Now you gotta give Vapi a try. V-A-P-I dot A-I. Vapi dot A-I. Use the code TWIST200. T-W-I-S-T 200. to get$200 in free credits? That's over 1 ,000 minutes in calls. Great job to the FAPI team.

32:39The ad we showed there was Outlar is looking for talented accounting and tax experts to help train generative AI models. And you need a bachelor's degree or higher in agriculture-related subjects, experience working as agriculture. Right, I think this is what's fascinating. They're really, they're not just looking for random freelance writers. They want category experts. People that have expertise in very specific niches because they've got so much data they've got to sift through. They need somebody who's just going to focus on farming, agriculture, like interior department stuff. And then I'm sure there's other people on nutrition and food, like everything a newspaper would report on.

33:19It's really fascinating stuff. There's a ton of other people who are doing this. Appian data annotation. Sure, Scale AI, the parent company of Outlier is doing some of this themselves. I also thought it was interesting. They're looking for people in international languages. They want people to do this in Thai, Dutch, Hindi, Swedish, Spanish, and French now, too. Funny joke from Cecilia Hack we can pull up here. Outlier is looking for advanced English writers to help train AI systems in LLMs. When they offer to pay you to help make your journalism job become obsolete. And in some ways, it's true.

33:53You know, if you're an accountant and you train this and there's a hundred accountants training this and they do a really good job, then maybe the AI will be doing those accounting jobs. Right. Yeah. If they do a good enough job, this can take over the writing of blurbs. They don't need blurb writers anymore if the AI gets good enough. uh captions all that stuff and then you think about like pilots when i was talking to some of the jobies of the world and other uh you know uh kitty hawk which then got subsumed by some other company at the all-in summit last year one of them said we're just trying to make the best pilot in the world the singular best pilot in the world like sully like air airplane pilots yes like you're gonna fly in a plane that's that's being flown by a computer that is what vetoes the vertical takeoff and landing um you first well here's the thing it turns out actually that already 80 90 percent of flying is done on autopilot of course there's so i get that i get say the 20 that isn't is the landing and a lot of cases and the takeoff or whatever and then when you get up in the air they press the button but sometimes they press the button when they're landing you put it all together that last 10 or 20 will be figured out by ai and it will be done better just like driving and cabs will be better than your average cab driver because humans are fallible whether that happens in five years or 15 we can debate but it's happening and um i think that those rote jobs truck driver pilot and cab driver will be done better by ai uh certainly 10 times better because almost every time it's pilot era it's almost every time it's a driver error or distracted driver and you still need to have some experts in the loop to take over but yeah it's going to be um pretty impressive uh when we see that happening all right all right yeah i don't i don't know i'm gonna wait for a few other i'm gonna wait a few years before i get into an ai uh airplane that's just that's just it's gonna be a process you know if you look at waymo waymo in san francisco it's pretty amazing when you take one but it goes slow it's jerky at times it takes weird routes you know it's not for everybody i tried my first waymo the last time i was in austin a few weeks ago it was open through the uh amanda and z and i took a took a waymo uh while we were hanging out did you have did somebody have the invite from the waymo app it was amanda amanda our your friend amanda has what they're doing in austin is i think because they somebody from waymo invited me as well i have to click the link yeah you have to have an i've never been in one because i didn't i didn't have access to the test and he did it what was your impression of it i was very impressed it worked perfectly it at one point we made sort of a weird like three-part right hand term that was a little nerve-wracking but not really there was at no point did i feel in any danger at all another trend that's happening um that's pretty clear and i and i tweeted about it today we like to focus on trends is hot swappable llms hot swappable means you can just like i was saying with biden they were going to hot swap biden which they did you could hot swap hard drives what that meant is you could pull a hard drive out of a server plug another one in and the raid array would um just balance and redo the backups and you could hot swap which means you take it out the system doesn't stop running well with llms we're going to start seeing hot swappable llms and there was a tweet by aaron paris aaron p613 yeah from mac rumors he's a he's a mac rumors guy he tweeted this um uh because you know what they do is is really interesting they they go into the betas and they look at the code somehow right and then they find little breadcrumbs one of the breadcrumbs here is that in ios 18.4 we might see apple intelligence instead of just being able to launch a conversation with chat gpt by open ai they could you could pop one open with gemini um and i think gemini is a bit better than open ai right now and so this is interesting we're looking at down the road somewhere this is obviously not coming in ios 18.4 necessarily but uh they're they're laying the groundwork for maybe integrating gemini along with uh open ai's chat gpt into ios at some point nine to five max says we're probably going to see apple intelligence debut by ios 18 or 19 Apple has already said they are hoping for the conversational Siri model to be here by iOS 19.

38:33Apple demoed its Apple visual intelligence suite of products and features back in September. But nonetheless, the company may be giving users more options in terms of AI services. There's some suggesting that maybe perplexity and even other models could get in on this over time. uh barry schwartz responded to this aaron paris comment and uh suggested maybe rather than it just being gemini it could be specifically integrating google data into apple intelligence like could it be google shopping results being pulled in but not necessarily full gemini integration into ios aaron says no but did not uh decline to go further in in terms of why that's impossible yeah it's a different product is the answer i think that this is the next giant search deal and that obviously android has integrated gemini on a very deep level so i specifically bought the google pixel 9 fold so i could experience both the fold and experience gemini integrated into the android operating system in fact i bought you on or i asked them to buy you a pixel 9 so you could uh experience that as well it's on its way to me right now perfect and not the fold i got you the regular one the folds a bit much and i think it slows you down i don't need the fold i'm okay well i'll say i have found it really nice when i'm at a cafe or i'm on a plane i do find myself opening it up and watching a youtube video or uh which is very nice experience i got the macbook air though it's so it's it's almost like a tablet mixed with a laptop i bring it everywhere i like having three four screens with me at all times when i travel yeah so i bring my ipad pro which is giant i bring my macbook air i bring my google pixel fold and i bring my iphone sure and i like having the optionality of different ones for different purposes i also like you know since i'm an angel investor in all these companies being focused on that but let me pull up my um my tweet here for a second and i'll just tell you what i think is going to happen here because of hot swappable llms i think apple will obviously let you choose which one you want to do they do that now at search right you can pick duck duck go you can pick bang so if you want to go into the settings you can pick which music app you launch by default which maps app and you know it was a lot of hand-wringing and justice department pressure and pressure from other companies causing you know apple to have to you know add that back in the day they didn't allow third-party media players they got pressured into putting vlc on there they didn't allow third-party browsers they got pushed to put opera and firefox and chrome on your ios and obviously you know they don't want to get caught up in uh banning other music services from iphones because that would be a bad look yeah so obviously apple is going to let you pick when you talk to siri i think you'll in your settings say chat gpt gemini grok whatever you prefer but this is going to lead to a commercial deal and uh then chat gpt and gemini uh grok and everybody flawed will all bid on it i think apple will get at the start at least a billion dollars annually for this wow this is big business yeah yeah and i think they'll do like a five-year deal very similar to what they did with google search right when you do uh on your phone and this was really important and this is tens of billions of dollars a year for apple in pure profit that you're that the default is google but i think this is going to determine like 10 20 points of consumer queries to language models in other words as great as chad chippie t's lead is if they don't get this deal with apple and gemini does then google is going to have done what they did with search they locked down android for half the queries they locked an ios for the other half so if android uses gemini but fault they're already at like 50 of the queries that could come from a device and so the iphone deal is going to determine who wins the language model wars and the ai query wars in all likelihood yeah i think that makes uh i think that makes total sense and it's interesting how these companies are sort of battling over this same thing in so many different areas we We just saw Apple and Google are fighting over streaming now.

42:53And does Apple TV get to live on Android devices? And so it's just the next front in that ever non-ending war of who's allowed into whose platform and who's walled garden. All right. If you want to check in on the docket, go to thisweekinstartups.com slash docket. We are making the docket public. If you're using the docket, you can put comments on the docket. the team will see them we start working on the docket in the morning before the show on monday wednesday and fridays so you can watch us actually in real time build the docket this week it's a lot it's a lot it's a lot of work it's a lot of docket and we get to only about half the stories i like to have twice as much docket as i need and then uh yeah that means we can serve up a great show for you and what you see live is about 125 of the show we wind up publishing in other words the published show is 80 of the live show and the docket is 2x the live show so there's a lot of content there that we don't get to and you get to have all that content right at your fingertips let's go to the next story here this one is under reported i think it's important you know there's a real problem with these meme coins and i think the problem is one group of people sees them as collectibles which is fine if you want to have that interpretation but how they present as i talked about on all in on thursday with the collison brothers they present as stocks even if you believe they're collectibles and there are a certain number of shares there are a certain number of coins they trade and they trade in some cases on platforms like robin hood coinbase etc and people share charts of them and they have a ticker symbol so it looks like a duck it quacks like a duck but people don't want to believe they're a duck this is what always gets me about the collectibles thing i think you're exactly right when you are a fan of a collectible and you're a collector it's always about the individual item you're not looking at well here's the pokemon index for this week it's about this individual card or this pack or you're looking for one item that you particularly want with you know But Funkos are everywhere, but you want that one special Funko that's worth so much.